“It’s not the big that eat the small, it’s the fast that eat the slow”

On Thursday afternoon I left Webstock to head up to the beautiful Hawkes Bay and enjoy two evenings and one day of mixing it with some of the people behind some of New Zealand’s fastest growing businesses.

2011 is the second year Rod Drury from Xero has held his Accelerate conference at the Black Barn Vineyard.

Thursday night started with a social gathering for those who had arrived in Havelock North already. It was great to catch up with a number of old faces and meet many new ones as well.

Friday the conference proper started and, after a brief introduction by Rod, Sam Morgan kicked off the morning session talking about the importance of the business model. This high level over view was then looked at in detail in conjunction with a series of presentations from the likes of Sonar6, Jucy, Sidhe, Aptimize, Snapper and VoucherMob.

The presentations were awesome and many people shared some amazing insights and numbers and Sam and Rod were able to pull out both the good and bad points of the various business models – some of the presenters certainly have a few tough but exciting calls to make in the near term!

Lunch at a vineyard is never a quick experience and Accelerate was no exception. The setting was great and the networking over a great lunch was very enjoyable.

During the morning various topics came up that were to form the basis for the afternoon sessions where discussions and examples were discussed from off-shore development to staff incentives.

A really interesting example from the afternoon was from Sonar6 and talked about how they have shifted their sales focus from the small end of the funnel (converting leads to customers) to the big end (converting suspects to prospects.) The examples and methodologies discussed were incredible and show the power of experimenting, informing and then a small bit of selling. Interestingly since shifting their focus, Sonar6 has made more sales with less sales people!

Following the afternoon session we had another enjoyable evening of networking which included more food and a concert Minuit in the Black Barn Cellar.

Conferences such as Accelerate are extremely positive. Due to a high level of trust amongst participants highly confidential information is shared freely in an open and stimulating environment where everyone benefits.

It is hard not to leave a conference like Accelerate feeling pumped up and the credit must go to Rod for not only organising a great event but also in the people he attracted. Many of New Zealand’s business angels attended along with a couple of VC’s from Silicon Valley.

You can read more about Accelerate from Rod or from Mark Robotham who has a more in depth overview of the day which has saved me significant typing time!

This post isn’t actually about day 1 it is about the first half of day 1 as I have since left the conference to catch a flight to Napier for http://0to60.com/#mce_temp_url# – more on that in the next few days.

So anyway, after 3 days of workshops today the conference proper started and the twitter hash tag (#webstock) started getting hammered!

Following a brief introduction by one of the organisers – a team that requires a huge vote of thanks - we kicked off with Frank Chimero (@fchimero)

Frank talked about Digital Campfires and more particularly story telling.

Story telling and humanizing the web are extremely important concepts and have formed a strong part of the strategic branding work carried out by Cadimage with Brian Richards over hte last couple of years.

Frank used the simple concept of cold and warm to help indicate the power of great story telling. Saying your ‘xxxx’ (insert: wife, husband, boyfriend, girlfriend etc) is 72.8% water is not particularly warm – though factually correct!

Another extremely powerful example was an advertising exec from New York who for weeks walked past a blind man on to work each day who held a sign that simply said “Blind” After a few weeks the advertising guy asked the blind guy if he could adjust his sign. The sign was updated to read “It is spring and I am blind” Not surprisingly at the end of the day the Blind man’s cup was full of spare change.

Other comments Frank made that really indicate the power of and reason behind story telling included:

Stories connect us

We get together to get better

Webstock is a campfire

We tell stories to understand and to be understood

Following Frank was Michael Koziarski (@nzkoz) who decided against pushing Ruby on Rails but instead concentrated on how to be successful and the concept of Skunk Works and outlined some pointers for managers and developers/designers. The interesting advice for developers/designers was essentially “Quit your Job”

The morning was wrapped up hearing from Facebooks’  David Recordon who talked about HTML5 at Facebook, and then Mark Pilgram’s HTML5 keynote.

Over the morning was great and the buzz at the breaks was incredible.

As outlined in yesterdays post today’s workshop was “In-depth with HTML5: getting started with 4 key technologies with Mark Pilgrim”

I have never intended this blog to get overly technical so beyond telling you that we covered off four key HTML5 technologies – Video, Canvas, Local Storage and Offline – I thought it was best to share a series of useful links to various HTML5 resources.

• Firstly Mark Pilgram’s online book is a great starting point!
• Modernizr is a useful js library that makes it simple to check browser compatibility regarding new web features
• For those wanting to produce various video formats Miro Video Converter is extremely simple convertor with almost no settings!
• Videojs is another useful js library to deal with HTML5 video
• html5bolierplate.com and Initializr get your  started fast with HTML5
• Blowup HTML 5 is a site that shows the power of crossing <video> with <canvas>
• 20 Things I learned is a google 20% project that show cases much of HTML5 capabilities

Today the Webstock 2011 Workshops kicked off. My day was all about “How To Make Information Beautiful with David McCandless“

Based in London, David has developed a number of infographics and took us through the steps he follows to take a concept/problem/question through to a completed infographic.

Infographics, data visualisations and information is design is a rising trend and the depth of information contained in the infographics is staggering and much of this information is generally not visible – which is the beauty and purpose of the graphics David creates.

As an example, David once decided to try to grasp the concept of ‘billions’ – David struggled with the media dealing in billions like they were common to everyone when in fact “they’re mind-boggling and near incomprehensible without context” so David set about comparing various billion dollar values to provide a context for understanding.

The creation process involves four steps:

• Stub – an idea, image, question, dataset, problem or subject
• Concept – an idea you can explain to someone
• Sketch – free hand to explore the concept
• Design – the final infographic – sometimes requiring many drafts!

An important key is to remember that “Relationships are Beautiful” and related information/data can provide a great basis for a infographic.

Once complete an infographic should be:

• Self-sufficient
• Optimized (not to be confused with simplified)
• Revealing
• Relative

The ability to display complex information and relationships in an engaging and easy to understand format in my opinion is a true talent – though that said I plan to give it a go so keep an eye out over the next few weeks.

In the meantime tomorrow’s workshop gets me into HTML5 so a bit of a change of pace I am sure but no doubt just as interesting as today.